A well-researched, true-life drama that makes history—and the players in it—feel utterly alive.
Neeleman’s sprawling historical novel follows the tumultuous events of the French Revolution and three key players whose lives get swept up in the violence.
The prologue begins in 1789, just two days before the storming of the Bastille. Radical journalist Camille Desmoulins witnesses firsthand the chaos that ensues when it is announced that the French king has dismissed the last remaining liberal among his ministers. Two years later, the English American political activist Thomas Paine is in Paris to oversee the translation of his famous book, Rights of Man. He awakens to the news that King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, having been imprisoned by the people in their Tuileries Palace for over a year and a half, have fled. Meanwhile, the opportunistic politician Joseph Fouché manages to gain increasing sway over constituents of the National Convention, which moves to make France a republic instead of a monarchy. As readers follow the increasingly intricate personal and political activities of these three characters as their individual story threads come together, there are many supporting players who are also drawn in—from the deeply divisive Maximilien Robespierre, whose radical and sometimes violent ways bring danger to those around him (and eventually himself) to Marguerite Brazier, whose complicated personal relationship with Paine sometimes threatens to overshadow her political involvement. Neeleman also navigates the often labyrinthine dealings of dueling revolutionary factions—the Convention versus the Paris Commune and the left-wing Jacobins (“The Mountain”) versus the right-wing Jacobins (“the Girondins”)—and explores the effects these politics have on the people who live them.
The French Revolution involves so many moving parts that it can be difficult to make sense of them and convey a sense of urgency about what’s happening. Neeleman manages to do just that, however, by wisely focusing on three extremely important figures who, in turn, overlap with other famous names. A sense of foreboding and tension ratchets up exponentially throughout the novel, as in a particularly grim scene in which increasingly hostile groups debate whether or not to have the king executed. While there are plenty of mentions of violence, including one politician’s “head on a pike, his mouth stuffed with hay, the body dragged naked through the streets of Paris,” those instances never feel gratuitous or overly graphic. Some of the dialogue can fall flat, especially when Neeleman attempts to work in past events to give readers some historical context for the current happenings. But the expository writing shines, both when covering political machinations and in quieter moments that help readers connect with these real figures of history as actual people: “Camille is feeling in his breast that pressure combined with ache that has become chronic. It has kept him up nights; it flared up during the queen’s trial and execution. Initially, he wondered if he was suffering a heart attack. He now has accepted that, indeed, it is his conscience. Nothing has surprised him so much as the realization that he has a conscience.” All of these components—the people, the places, the events both big and small—can be difficult to keep straight. Neeleman effectively leads the way with three-dimensional characters and an informed approach to this fascinating slice of history.
A well-researched, true-life drama that makes history—and the players in it—feel utterly alive.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781948598781
Page Count: 457
Publisher: Open Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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